Chimpanzees and lowland gorillas are close relatives but their social structures are strikingly different, and Elisabetta Palagi wanted to know if these differences were reflected in the playfulness of adults. “I am convinced that play is a perfect indicator of…

Breanna Putman began questioning whether what she wore affected animals during a study of urban nature. “We were encouraged to wear these bright neon orange T-shirts to identify us as scientists,” she recalls. “I wondered if wearing them in urban…

While rainbow trout are carnivorous, a selected strain performs well on a soy-based feed ― and tolerance of this vegetarian diet is linked to 63 genes, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Jason Abernathy…

Once female elk make it to 9 or 10 years old, they hardly ever fall prey to human hunters — and Henrik Thurfjell of the University of Alberta, Canada wanted to know why. “I’m fascinated by how we humans fit…

Decades of political isolation have made Myanmar the most forested country in mainland Southeast Asia, providing critical habitat for endangered species. “Myanmar is a globally recognized biodiversity hotspot,” says Peter Leimgruber of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal,…

Great apes may be even more like us than we thought. We already knew that they can understand someone else’s goals, intentions and desires. However, scientists have long believed that they lack the capacity for understanding what others believe —…

Bigger mammals generally need less sleep, and new research shows that African elephants ― the biggest land mammals of all ― need the least sleep at just two hours a day. Elephants were known to sleep as long as six…

Bottlenose dolphins that live near people often beg for food, and begging rates are particularly high in the waters near Savannah, Georgia. Dolphins there also follow commercial shrimp trawlers, eating fish that are stuck in or stirred up by the…

Language, which is part of what makes us human, is thought to have evolved within the last 100,000 years or so. Bolstering this relatively recent timeline, conventional wisdom holds that nonhuman primates are not capable of producing the five vowels…

From watching coconut crabs in the wild, Shin-ichiro Oka knew their claws were amazingly strong. And the crabs are known to be able to lift as much as 28 kilograms — seven times their top body weight of 4 kg.…